Google Play Keeps Saying Waiting for Download

My daughter & I spent a good day or more attempting to download Pokemon Go on her cellphone.

As soon as we clicked on “Install”, Google would show us the spinning circle and say “Waiting for Download” indefinitely.

What we tried:

Light Weight Approach

Go to Settings

Tap on Apps.

Tap on Apps again.

Scroll down the list of apps and tap on Google Play Store.

Tap on Storage, Clear Cache and then on Clear Data.

Verdict: Did not work

Medium Weight Approach

Another post talked about also clearing the Google Play Services cache, therefore in addition to clearing the Google Pay Store Cache, we added the following steps:

Also on the list of Apps at [3] above, tap on Google Play Services.

Tap on Storage, Clear Cache and then on Clear Data.

Verdict: Did not work

Heavy Weight Approach

On one of the groups, a poster suggested that Waiting for Download is due to the fact that updates are queued ahead of the app you are trying to download.

Therefore to disable updates, there are two approaches we tried

Disabling updates on all apps through Google Play Store

Open the Google Play Store.

Tap on the three horizontal dots icon on the top-left.

Tap on Settings.

Tap on “Auto-Update apps”, and Don’t auto update apps.

Disabling apps one-by-one to not auto update

Open the Google Play Store.

Tap on “My apps & games”

Tap on an app

Tap on the the three horizontal dots icon on the top-right.

Uncheck “Enable auto updates”

Do this for all apps

Verdict: Leaving the phone for about 15 minutes solved the problem and app started downloading.

Some more things to try if phone stays stuck on “Waiting for Download”

Turn off Bluetooth, then go to Google Play Store, tap on “My apps & games”, tap on “Update All”. Downloads and update might all install.

Turn parental controls off

Check if there is enough space available on the device

The Nuclear Option

For some people, following the Light, Medium and Heavyweight approach, along with removing their Google account off the phone did the trick. Please note the downside is that you would lose all data that has been synced to your phone.

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